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Tuesday, March 4, 2014

California Missions, Redesigned with Minecraft EDU Part 2

California Missions in Minecraft Part 2, Constructing El Camino

While easier than building a real life El Camino Real, crafting the base world for the Minecraft EDU mission project was challenging and rewarding. In a bulleted list, here are my steps, some changes I would make, and some difficulties I ran into:

To start I chose to create a randomly generated world. I turned off day and night as well as PVP and fire and TNT.

Originally I decided to build the road out of yellow wool, think Wizard of Oz. However, then I realized that some kids could simply destroy my road if they wanted to. So I decided to remove that road I had already crafted and replace it with the red x blocks which would prevent students from destroying it and thus losing their way between mission sites.

I created missions sites by using placing a simple sign post with a number to mark their area. Then I switched to a stacked block approach so the tower was more visible. From top to bottom: Number Blocks, Information Block, Type Block, Base purple block.

At first, I wanted to make a full day pass in between mission locations to mimic the days journey between missions in California, but I noticed that as I spent time laying the road it would take me too long to construct. Thus I simply made them “generally far” apart. In retrospect, some of the mission plots I made too close together. I would make sure that the sites have ample area so that the students do not intrude on neighboring plots.

Some of the sites are placed in heavily forested areas due to the generated world. I am a bit worried about how students will fare in this terrain as well as desert terrain, but I am looking forward to seeing how it pans out.

I am wondering if generating a flat world would have been better for the project as a whole. If it were flat, students could focus completely on building rather than clearing their area. Pros for choosing the randomly generated world is that it is more realistic in regards to settling a new land.